Using HDMI With ATI Radeon HD Linux Drivers

One of the special abilities of ATI's R600 GPU family is the integrated
5.1 surround sound audio support through HDMI. Many Radeon HD 2000 and HD 3800
series graphics cards also ship with a DVI to HDMI dongle, so that one can experience
the full video playback capabilities of these discrete graphics cards. But what
level of HDMI support can Linux users expect when using these latest ATI graphics
cards? We have done some testing internally and have the initial ATI Linux HDMI video and audio
results to report in this article.

The graphics card used for this Linux HDMI (High Definition Media
Interface) testing was the ASUS
Radeon HD 2600PRO 256MB, which was connected via a DVI-to-HDMI dongle to a
Sharp Aquos LC37D43U 37" LCD HDTV. For the video portion of the HDMI, we
had tested both the fglrx and RadeonHD drivers and ALSA for audio.

Using the ATI Linux "fglrx" driver, the system running
Ubuntu 7.10 had booted without any issues and was running at 1920 x 1080 through
no end-user intervention or manually specifying any display modes. Entering the
AMD Catalyst Control Center Linux Edition, there were no problems with managing
the Sharp HDMI display and everything had worked out smoothly.

At 1920 x 1080, the Radeon HD 2600PRO had no problems running
Compiz Fusion at this resolution. Enemy Territory: Quake Wars was also running
at this resolution and high-quality settings, with an average frame-rate of ~26
FPS. Everything on the display front had worked out, though we didn't expect any
problems as this was just running through an included DVI-to-HDMI dongle.